Dyn dinged by DDoS: US DNS firm gives web a bad hair day

Reddit, Github, Airbnb and pals affected

A denial of service attack against managed DNS provider Dyn restricted access to many US-based websites on Friday.

The ongoing attack is affecting Dyn’s managed DNS customers on the US East Coast, according to the provider, which adds on its status page that its “engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue”.

Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time.

The strength of the attack, as well as its source, remains unclear. Sites experiencing issues as a result of the attack include Github, Airbnb, Reddit, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties. SoundCloud, Spotify and Shopify have also been affected. The sites themselves are fine but DNS lookups may be slow, leading to problems.

Richard Meeus, VP technology EMEA at NSFOCUS, a DDoS mitigation company, commented: ”DNS has often been neglected in terms of its security and availability from an enterprise perspective – it is treated as if it will always be there in the same way that water comes out of the tap and electricity is there when you switch it on.

“This attack highlights how critical DNS is to maintaining a stable and secure internet presence, and that the DDOS mitigation processes businesses have in place are just as relevant to their DNS service as it is to the web servers and data centres,” he added. ®